Custom Ipsum for Real-World Testing

Pastures which are subject to overflow should be avoided. All lambs born in April or May should be drenched about August or September following, to be certain of ridding them of worms that may later cause their death. This is output from a tool I built called Veterinary Ipsum. It’s something I’ve created a few times: a Lorem Ipsum generator specific to my company’s business domain. ...

June 27, 2025

Thinking of Bugs in Classes

We spent the time writing tests, and yet, a bug survived. Should we just stop writing tests? No, but we should maybe write better tests, and think about them differently. ...

September 3, 2023

Cold Water for Your Code Coverage

Code coverage, the percentage of your code covered by automated tests, is a metric associated with quality. In this post, I’d like to investigate this association. And pour some cold water on it. ...

March 28, 2023

Why Do I Have to Use the Factorybot Gem, Again?

The FactoryBot gem, previously known as FactoryGirl, is ubiquitous in Ruby and Ruby on Rails testing. If you aren’t familiar with it, you might be wondering, what’s the point? Wouldn’t it be simpler to just build objects myself? ...

October 17, 2022

RSpec.describe vs. describe: Which Should I Use?

Ruby’s RSpec describe block has two common syntaxes. Which should you use? ...

April 2, 2022

On Disabling Tests

Today I want to talk about a common technique: disabling failing tests to allow a feature to ship. Maybe sometimes you gotta do it. But long-term I think it causes more problems than it solves. ...

February 22, 2022

Want Better Automated Tests? Hard-Code Your Expectations

Hard-coded test expectations have many benefits that I’ll explore in this post. ...

January 25, 2022

A Short Introduction to Test-Driven-Development (TDD)

I’ve practiced TDD (Test-Driven-Development) a lot and feel knowledgable about when it’s useful and when it isn’t. In this post, I’d like to summarize what I’ve learned. ...

September 11, 2019

Learn to Test

What is a skill one could learn to set themselves apart from other entry-level programmers? Testing. ...

July 15, 2016